War Breaks Out Between Hackers and Scientology - There Can Be Only One

Wired/January 23, 2008

By Ryan Singel

A loose confederation of online troublemakers who call themselves
Anonymous have declared war on the Church of Scientology by flooding
its servers with fake data requests, describing the attacks as
punishment for the Church's alleged abuse of copyright laws and
alleged brainwashing of its members.

Anonymous congregates on the net at various hangouts such as
711chan.org (NSFW) and partyvan.info and sundry IRC channels. The
group usually amuses itself by stealing passwords to downloading sites
and finding ways to harass online communities that its members
disdain. They were last seen on THREAT LEVEL when a Los Angeles Fox
News affiliate ran a story that hilariously implied the group's
arsenal included exploding vans.

The attack on Scientology, which Anonymous has dubbed Project
Chanology, started in recent days, set off by the Church's most recent
attempt to censor the internet by forcing sites to remove a creepy Tom
Cruise Scientology video. A wiki set up for the project directs
Anonymous members to download and use denial of service software, make
prank calls, host Scientology documents the Church considers
proprietary, and fax endless loops of black pages to the Church's fax
machines to waste ink.

From the Wiki page for Project Chanology:

"Let our message ring out from the highest e-mountain.

So you want to join Project Chanology eh? Fight the good fight for the
Internet? Or perhaps you are a skeptic, doubtful we can do anything? I
won't lie to you. I am an /i/nsurgent first, a /b/tard second, and an
all around Anonymous, but I know that for a fight against the Beast it
will take more then possible even every chan combined could muster. We
might be rivals; hell, we might hate each other's guts, but this goes
beyond just us. The people of the Internet, Anonymous, the Goons of
SA, the YTMNDers, various hacker groups, trolls of the world, the
GameFAQs members, the Gaians, the eBaumers; us old time Internet
users, and the newest of noobs, the YouTubers and MySpacers, must band
together for a fight that transcends our differences and takes us to a
level beyond our individual selves. When things happen to Scientology,
like that South Park episode or Tom Cruise going insane on Oprah's
show, Scientology loses lots of credential. We need to finish that
off, or leave it open for the major media to deliver the
coup-de-grace."

Anonymous has also sent out a press release and issued this video manifesto.

The Church of Scientology was founded by science fiction writer L. Ron
Hubbard in 1952, and has a large presence in Los Angeles.
Scientology's core beliefs center on overcoming traumas from earlier
lives, something overcome through sessions with a Scientologist
"auditor" who uses an "e-meter" to measure electrical changes in the
petitioner's body.

The highly secretive Church of Scientology is liberal in its use of
lawsuits to attack its critics and to have Church documents removed
from the internet.

The Church of Scientology did not immediately respond to a call for comment.

Correction: This story initially reported that the Church of
Scientology had issued a $5,000.00 reward to identify members of
Anonymous. That reward was issued months ago, seemingly in response to
another online attack. Archive.org has a copy from July 2007.

THREAT LEVEL regrets the error and thanks commenters for pointing it out.

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